2019 is proving to be a quietly powerful year for Welsh cinema – and near the top of the list is Gwen, a gothic drama set in the looming mountains of Snowdonia. Fedor Tot talks to writer and director William McGregor.
Craggy peaks, isolated farmsteads, and ominous clouds. Snowdonia has been used plenty as the cinematic backdrop to various films, from sky-high fantasy to medieval period drama, but so rarely has it been used to play itself. Gwen, the feature debut from Norfolk-born William McGregor, makes full and glorious use of the landscape, a gothic drama with an undercurrent of horror that suits the geography perfectly.
Set in the 19th century, it tells the story of its titular character (played by Eleanor Worthington-Cox), who lives with her little sister and her mother Elen (Maxine Peake), in near-poverty deep in the hills, the father away to war. In the local village, fast becoming a slate-quarrying centre, are a series of masculine figures – most recognisably Mark Lewis Jones and Richard Harrington – who cast suspicious eyes towards the family, possibly eyeing the land for business.
There’s shades of modern folk-horror here, particularly if you’re a fan of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, though Gwen is far from a horror in any meaningful sense of the word. The landscape, though, remains central, something that McGregor had in mind from the start.
“The landscape has always been a huge influence on me. I think especially once myself and [producer] Hilary Bevan Jones talked about choosing this idea of a fairytale in Snowdonia, the next step really was to go and stay in Snowdonia. We stayed in Betws-y-Coed and explored the area and some of the scenes in the story came from exploring the landscape. A lot of folk stories and gothic stories [exist] because you’re exposed to this wild, bleak conspiring, dangerous landscape and that inspires the stories that people tell within them.”
That sense of landscape permeates much of McGregor’s work to date. “My filmmaking started that way, just telling stories about specific places. I don’t know another way. It’s how a space inspires you and the stories of that region. People told each other folk stories by word of mouth – it’s about your neighbour and the land you grew up in. My next project is set in the Norfolk Fens, and it’s a story about that region. A sense of place and where you’re from is what inspires me to tell my stories.”
If the film were being fully historically accurate to the time period, of course, its principal cast would be speaking Welsh. It was, in the end, a decision based mostly on functionality, a question of “Can I make my first feature film in another language?” for McGregor – he directed a short version of the film in Slovenia called Who’s Afraid Of The Water Sprite? (available on YouTube), which he admits to finding difficult.
But, he concedes, it would have been interesting “especially with the anti-capitalist message of the film because the language was used as a defence. People that worked together spoke Welsh and the English mine owners couldn’t understand them… The language and landscape tie together. The language is so beautiful and poetic and has its own richness and flavour and that’s why we had all the singing in Welsh and that’s why, even if it’s just ‘nos da’, we wanted little moments peppered throughout and also not to subtitle it. If you speak Welsh, you’ll understand the richness of it, and as a non-Welsh speaker you appreciate it is a part of the landscape and their world.”
Will McGregor didn’t make shooting his first feature wholly easy on himself. Gwen was shot in November on location, but that extra effort adds a sense of authenticity to the film. Obstacles included days where the director of photography couldn’t set up the lighting rig because the wind was too strong, or the snow turned the landscape into something completely unrecognisable.
“The location manager who I worked with had on the wall in the office, ‘I’m a part of something bigger than the heartache,’ so for all of the issues, you’re thinking about the bigger picture. Had Gwen} been made in a studio, the blister of mountains would have been green screen and it would have been easier, but the authenticity [would have been lacking]. You know what to expect if you’re shooting in Snowdonia in November!”
Gwen is out in cinemas from Fri 19 Jul. Preview screenings and Q+A with director at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Thu 11 Jul. Info: www.bulldog-film.com/films/gwen/